A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

It seems that some Chinese company already has managed to make a clone of the 3D Vision shutter glasses, surprisingly they do look almost like the original (at least the glasses) with the IR transmitter being somewhat strange. The product was noticed on eBay being sold under the name of “3D Adventurer” and being sold by a person from UK, claiming it is fully compatible with the original 3D Vision glasses, but at a lower price than the original. I suppose that some people might get attracted by the lower price, but have in mind that there might be problems in terms of compatibility and other issues, so my recommendation is to not to rush and beware of such non-original products. At least until does a thorough review of them and we have more information on their level of compatibility, quality, durability etc., although I’d still prefer the original from Nvidia. It seems they might’ve done a good job with the glasses, but the IR transmitter actually looks quite bad and a bit far from being comfortable to use, especially controlling the level of the depth, or at least it looks like that. Maybe if the Chinese guys did not try to just copy, but also to improve them further they would’ve been a more interesting product and not just attract with a lower price, bundled with a lot of unknown factors… ;)

If you remember I’ve written that the shutter glasses designed by Nvidia for the GeForce 3D Vision are way looking much better than previous such products, but here I made some pictures so you can even see that for yourself. In the left of the images you can see the glasses from Nvidia and on the right are eDimensional’s wireless 3D Vision glasses, the difference in design is clearly visible…

Besides being more good-looking Nvidia’s glasses are also more comfortable and adjustable to the needs of different users, not that Edimenstional’s glasses don’t have such ideas embedded, but their design is still not that good. By making shutter glasses you need to design them so that they not only don’t look weird, but also to be comfortable even when wearing them for longer periods of time…

Not that the shutters on eDimensional’s glasses are almost square in form, where as the glasses from Nvidia are wider and this is because of big difference in time when the products were designed and first released on market. eDimensional’s 3D Vision glasses are quite old product, as far as I remember released 5 or even more years ago when the CRT displays with aspect ration of 4:3 or 5:4 were used almost everywhere. But now most of the new displays are widescreen with aspect of 16:10 and 16:9 so having wider shutters is not only good, but is actually a requirement in order to have the wide filed of view needed for the new LCD monitors. Another big difference is that eDimensional’s glasses use 2 lithium batteries for power that are not rechargeable and you have to replace them from time to time, although they last longer than the rechargeable battery available in Nvidia’s glasses. Anyway with up to 40 hours on a single charge and an easy and widely used mini USB connection for recharging there is not much to complain about Nvidia’s 3D Vision glasses.

Here I have not provided pictures of the IR transmitters of the two types of wireless shutter glasses, but you should know that eDimensional’s solution does not rely on USB connection and actually requires you to connect it between your video card’s output and the monitor you are using. And you can already guess that it utilizes an analogue DSUB15 video connector in order to do that and the drivers are supposed to do everything else. Now, when talking about drivers, eDimensional had a bit of an advantage, becuse they used their own drivers that were compatible with both ATI and Nvidia video cards, although the glasses also worked with Nvidia’s old stereo drivers. Currently eDimensional’s drivers are quite out of date and not very usable, and the newer stereo drivers from Nvidia no longer support them (along with many other older devices!). If you own eDimensional 3D Vision glasses or any other shutter glasses you may try to run them with IZ3D’s driver, but the success rate depends on a lot of factors and the results will still not be as good as when using Nvidia’s 3D Vision. Not to mention the fact that if you intend to use the IZ3D driver (besides just quick testing) with something else than their 3D displays you’ll have to buy a license and the shutter glasses support that is currently available is still not very good, so don’t get your hopes too high.